Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood (Part 1)

This conversation not only highlights Susan and VIDA’s journey but is an excellent analysis of the Pharmaceutical Services space. If you’re looking to do/doing a startup in this field, the conversation should be illuminating.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Susan Wood: I was born and raised in Maryland. I grew up in a small town called Aberdeen which is about 23 miles north of Baltimore. We weren’t destitute, but we certainly weren’t affluent by any stretch. I went to university at the University of Maryland. I was a hockey player at Maryland.

Sramana Mitra: What did you study?

Susan Wood: Mechanical engineering. I got a needs-based scholarship from the Army. Aberdeen, Maryland is known for two things. One is it’s an Army base.

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking?

Susan Wood: The early to mid-80s.

Sramana Mitra: I went to MIT as a grad student. As expected, the number of women in the engineering program was not very high. What was your experience?

Susan Wood: There were two of us. During my first foray into entrepreneurship, I always wanted to incorporate computational science and medicine. That was part of my passion. I changed my major. The University of Maryland gave me the flexibility to do this. They didn’t have a program at that time to change my major to Biomedical Engineering.

I crafted my own program. I did a lot of the pre-med stuff as well as the engineering components. I took an extra semester to do that and sort of got a biomedical engineering degree. I went on to go to Duke to do my Masters in Biomedical Engineering. From there, I got my Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Susan Wood: I left Hopkins after a postdoc in 1995.

Sramana Mitra: The internet is now in the picture.

Susan Wood: Yes, but barely. I did a semester in Australia when I was a grad student. At that time, there was no internet. We started to get into that in 1995.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after?

Susan Wood: I left the academie and went to the industry right away. Some of this was about a guy. I have to come clean on that. My now husband was also a field hockey player. He played internationally for Canada. He was going to the Olympics in 1996 and couldn’t leave.

I worked for the only medical imaging company around which was ISG Technology. It turned into a component of IBM Watson Health. That was way after I left. It was a very engineering-centric company. I was in Toronto for a couple of years. There, he finished and retired. Then I came out to Silicon Valley for four years. It’s been over 20.

Sramana Mitra: What company did you come to in Silicon Valley?

Susan Wood: R2 Technology. It was really the matriarch of using AI in imaging. The primary project was in the automatic detection of cancer and screening mammography. Medical imaging data is very good structured data for AI.

Mammography is good because women come in asymptomatically. It’s a relatively clean dataset. It’s controlled coming in. You have an acquisition protocol that is regulated. And you have control going out. It was structured and controlled on both sides. It was a good first foray into AI and imaging.

I was brought in initially for their second program. At Hopkins, I studied the lung using imaging in health and disease. We could find, at a very precise level, what was happening to the lung long before we were getting symptoms. That was the passion and what I took into R2.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building an AI-Powered Pharmaceutical Services Business: VIDA CEO Susan Wood
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